In Search of Good Citizens and Civic Leaders?

Don’t Overlook Students Enrolled at Non-Selective Institutions

By J. Cherie Strachan
February 10, 2026

Recent discussions about reinvigorating the cultivation of good citizens and civic leaders in the United States have largely focused on the role that faculty at elite institutions should play in this endeavor. Yet tailoring such efforts to elite institutions will be ineffective overall for a number of reasons.

Not least of these is that very few US college and university students attend elite institutions. Only 6 percent attend a school with an acceptance rate of 25 percent or less; the vast majority attend non-selective institutions (NSIs) with admission rates of 70 to 80 percent. Efforts to educate citizens in a mass democracy must be implemented at NSI’s simply because that is where most students enroll.

It is also important to note that many students purposefully choose nearby campuses—and are often “undermatched” according to their academic ability—because most prefer geographic proximity over status. Nearly 70% of public four-year college students, for example, choose to attend an institution within two hours of their home. 

Beyond preparation for citizenship, less selective state institutions play an outsized role in preparing students who eventually serve as civic and political leaders. A strong pattern emerges at the state level—nearly 60 percent of governors, supreme court justices, legislative leaders, attorneys general, and education chiefs emerge from public universities. This pattern is surely even more prominent among local public servants.  

Even national leaders have alma maters that contradict the stereotype of Congress as an extension of the Ivy League – recent examples include Kevin McCarthy (California State University Bakersfield) Hakeem Jeffries (SUNY Binghamton), Mitch McConnel (University of Louisville) Joe Biden (University of Delaware) and Kamala Harris (Howard University).

Given the heavy lift that NSIs perform for our democracy, it is important to understand the way their circumstances and student bodies differ from those of their elite peers. First, since they have limited state funding and are suffering from declining enrollment, few have the capacity to establish a stand-alone Civic Thought Department. Even if they did, such a unit would be at immediate risk, given a growing trend to pass legislation eliminating low demand programs at state-funded schools.

However, faculty in political science, history, and philosophy departments in NSIs still care intently that courses on the democratic tradition in Western culture are taught —from the histories of ancient Greece and Rome to enlightenment political theory, American political thought and Constitutional law. In my discipline of political science, for example, job postings at NSIs typically focus on one of the three branches or on American political thought, as these are considered core classes in the major.

When new hires are willing to cover additional subjects (e.g., political media, campaigns/elections, gender and politics, or race and politics) these are considered a “bonus” and are offered as specialized upper-level electives to round out departmental offerings. NSI political science units particularly prioritize faculty hires in public law, as constitutional law classes are popular with pre-law and criminal justice majors, nearly always have a waiting list, and are considered an important source of revenue in tuition-driven budget models.

Similarly, my NSI colleagues in history and philosophy still prioritize hires who can teach courses on Western civilization and Western political thought, in part because these are popular, and in part because they are required courses in the general education program. The most straightforward way to preserve the exposure of the vast majority of college students to courses that relay this type of civic knowledge is to preserve NSI humanities and social science departments where faculty lines are dedicated to covering the most relevant coursework.

Second, the students at NSIs are fundamentally different than those at elite institutions, in large part because the children of the wealthiest Americans are drastically overrepresented in highly selective schools. At the Ivies, one in every six students has a parent in the top one percent of income earners. Further, applicants connected to the top .01 percent are more than twice as likely to be accepted at these institutions, even when their test scores are no higher than others seeking admission.

One consequence of this recruiting strategy is that Ivy League campuses tend to be more ideologically polarized.  Their campuses are characterized by clusters of intensely progressive or far left students—ideologies that are more common among wealthier classes, because post-materialism emerges when people have been free from economic concerns for successive generations.

Yet, perhaps surprisingly, elite students are generally not interested in pursuing their commitments through public service or nonprofit professions. Rather, they tend to arrive on campus in a hyper-competitive mode, facing off against one another in pursuit of far more lucrative jobs in finance, consulting, and technology. Estimates suggest anywhere from 40 to 60 percent of recent graduates from selective institutions pursue one of these three narrow career paths.

Students at elite institutions justify this choice in part by noting that they are increasingly skeptical of achieving social change through government and nonprofits. Instead, many embrace the concept of “effective altruism,” convinced that they will have more impact on the issues they care about through their future capacity to engage in philanthropy than through their own direct involvement.

Few if any of these characteristics are shared by students enrolled at NSIs. At NSIs students come from a much wider array of socio-economic backgrounds, leading to more diversity in lived experience and, as I have observed, less consistency in ideological preferences. While students with post-materialist political commitments still enroll at NSIs, they are not over-represented, and they are not always the loudest or most visible groups on campus.

In my experience, the presence of more students from lower and middle class backgrounds results in substantial numbers who are pragmatic and willing to embrace civility, deliberation and compromise, even across ideological and partisan lines. Perhaps the types of students more apt to enroll at NSIs are skilled at deliberating and assessing trade-offs because they are forced make these types of imperfect decisions about wicked problems frequently, as they juggle work, family, and academic obligations in their everyday lives.

Finally, NSI students are less intent on pursuing a narrow path to financial success and far more interested in pursuing public service professions. For example, recent political science graduates from my own NSI include those who have gone on to serve as executive directors of county party organizations, campaign consultants, state legislative aides, mayoral advisors, and nonprofit staff, as well as those who have already run for office or aspire to do so soon.

A long-term solution for cultivating good citizens and civic leaders at elite institutions may be to adjust recruitment strategies and admission policies to ensure the student body is comprised of students from a wider array of socioeconomic backgrounds. A more immediate and practical solution is to help NSIs, the institutions that educate the vast majority of US college students, continue to provide high-quality civics courses and experiential learning opportunities known to transform our students into the good citizens and civic leaders a functional democracy requires.

NSIs are, of course, not without our own distinct set of problems in this endeavor. Exposing students to transformative civic knowledge is hampered by the difficulty in sustaining humanities and social science departments in the face of declining enrollment. The growing pressure to offer three-year bachelor’s degrees also means that fewer students will be required to take these courses as general education requirements are pared down to make an abbreviated timeline to graduation feasible.

Beyond staffing and curricular concerns, our students are not hyper-competitive, and, especially in the post-pandemic era, encouraging them to seek out essential hands-on learning through internships and co-curricular experiences in student life has been difficult.

While challenging, these types of obstacles are not insurmountable and can be addressed through good leadership from campus presidents, innovative solutions from dedicated faculty, and responsive policymaking from state legislators. They will not be overcome, however, unless civic-minded faculty and administrators from NSIs are included in ongoing conversations about how to best reinvigorate civics instruction on our campuses.